Today’s
Family News
Working
women who come home to a happy marriage seem better able to recover
from
on-the-job stress than women whose marriages are unhappy, according to
a new
study reported last week by HealthDay News.
Researchers
at the
Among
men, the cortisol levels dropped at the end of the workday regardless
of their
level of satisfaction in their marriages. But that was not the case
among
women.
“Women
in unhappy marriages are coming home from a busy day and, instead of
having
some time to unwind and relax and have a spouse picking up the load of
setting
the table, getting dinner going, signing forms for the kids, these
women may have
to immediately launch back into another stressful routine,” clinical
psychologist and doctoral student Darby Saxbe told London’s Daily Telegraph.
“Perhaps
in happily married couples, the demands of domestic life are being
shared more
equitably between men and women, or at least that may be the case when
wives
return home from a demanding day at work.”
Women
who find themselves in a chronically unhappy marriage may face
“multiple
occasions everyday when the wife needs to mount a stress response,
putting her
cortisol levels on a kind of roller coaster ride,” said UCLA psychology
professor Rena Repetti.
The study is published in the January issue of Health Psychology.
